BIOENGINEERED MONSTERS
Ingram, Penelope · University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2023
This chapter examines racial allegory in science fiction, through a reading of the racial politics of Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond. It explores the whitewashing controversy surrounding the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonien Singhand JJ Abrams’diversity initiative following #OscarsSoWhite. It argues that, like other science fiction programming, these Star Trek reboots reflect, but also help to construct America’s changing views on race as brown and Black people are represented as instruments of biological terror with the capacity to destroy the purity and superiority of whiteness. The chapter also examines recent debates about bioengineering and eugenics and argues that the films raise troubling, yet timely questions about bioengineering and biological warfare and reveal that white fears about biology and developments in genetic science are frequently tied to white fears about racial others.